On 16/02/16 09:51, John Haxby wrote:
We'll also need a way of scheduling meetings across continents. "Is Monday at 1pm OK for you?" "No, I'll be asleep" We'll need a database of normal working/waking ours in different countries, this would be decided politically, of course, because you need to have shops and whatnot opening at consistent hours. We'll also need to account for the fact that working hours will probably shift an hour in the winter months to maximise daylight ("Don't forget that the shops open at 10am tomorrow!").
This piece is a double sided sword ... While currently '9am' local time is a useful shorthand for the start of the working/school day, many places simply don't follow what was once normal practice. Personally I know which sites will be ringing at 7:50, 8:20 or 8:50 but I need a database that flags up these different office opening hours. And YES the whole 'summer time' thing came out of the practice of having a different set of opening hours in the summer ... 'daylight saving' was just an attempt to standardise those changes. Is getting rid of the convenient shorthand for a locations rough daytime events cycle worth the effort, possibly, but it has to be replaced with a much more complex one that covers all the bases on event times round the world. We need the more complex one anyway as part of our calendering systems, so is the convenient 'CET', or 'EST' much of a problem really? It provides a fixed point against which other local events can be moved in unison? Otherwise we will be back to a free for all 'summer time/winter time' events transitions ... if you don't have tz you have to put something else in it's place :) -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk